Biographies K

 

 

 

 

 

 

Franz Kafka (1883-1924).
Austrian-Jewish author, a resident of Prague, author of The Trial, The Castle, "Metamorphosis," and other works; one of the most important writers of the modern age.

 

 

 

 

 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Influential German philosopher, author of Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

 

 

 

 

 

Joseph Karo (1488-1575)
Spanish-born Jewish lawyer and mystic.

 

 

 

 

 

John Keats (1795-1821)
British poet, one of the major figures of the Romantic era.

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Kenner (1923- )
Distinguished American literary critic, author of The Pound Era and other works.

 

 

 

 

 

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
German astronomer and natural philosopher, who formulated important laws of planetary motion.

 

 

 

 

 

Image from Britannica Online

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish philosopher and theologian, the father of existentialism. In a career of only twelve years, author of over twenty books (many written under pseudonyms), including Either-Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread, Stages on Life's Way, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

 

 

 

 

 

Clyde Kilby (1902-1986)
Professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL and founder and curator of the Marion E. Wade Collection. He was the author of Poetry and Life and of several books on C. S. Lewis. He contributed to Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity.

 

 

 

 

 

Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680)
Renaissance scientist and inventor, a pioneer of the camera obscura. 

 

 

 

 

 

George Lyman Kittredge (1866-1941)
Famous American Shakespearean scholar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Klee (1879-1940)
Swiss painter, one of the major artists of the 20th Century.

 

 

 

 

 

Arthur Koestler (1905-83) 
Hungarian-born writer (a citizen of Britain after 1946), author of several novels (including Darkness at Noon [1940]) and wide-ranging books on science, psychology, and philosophy: The Sleepwalkers (1959), The Act of Creation (1964), The Ghost in the Machine (1967), and Janus (1978).

 

 

 

 

 

Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967)
German gestalt psychologist, author of The Mentality of Apes  and other works.

 

 

 

 

 

David Koresh (1959-1993)
Leader of the Branch Davidian religious sect whose 51 day standoff with the U.S. Government in Waco, Texas in 1993 led to the death of four ATF agents, the incineration of the Davidians' house, and the death of 86 people inside, including Koresh himself.

 

 

 

 

 

Jiddu Krisnamurti (1895-1986)
Indian-born religous teacher and visionary, selected by Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society to be a spiritual leader when he was only a teenager.

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)
Historian of science, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions